Preaching and Artificial Intelligence

LOUISVILLE — Alison Gerber, a doctoral student in homiletics at Baylor University, delivered an insightful talk recently on “Preaching and Artificial Intelligence” as part of the Synod of the Covenant’s Cultivating the Gift of Preaching program. Listen to her 41-minute conversation with the synod’s executive, the Rev. Dr. Chip Hardwick, here.

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For understanding more about ChatGPT and other Large Language Models, Gerber recommends Ethan Mollick’s book, “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI.”

Preachers, journalists and many others use AI to help them perform certain mundane tasks. “The way ChatGPT works is it is a program that is fed a ton of text … hundreds of billions of words,” Gerber explained. “For a long time — months — it trains on this text and tries to create text using trial and error.”

Eventually, it provides the next most likely token — a word or part of a word, by working on “statistical probabilities and patterns it has observed in the human language it’s been given. That’s all it’s doing,” Gerber told Hardwick. “It’s not talking in the way we talk. It’s thinking about what’s the next statistically likely bit that I need to output in response to the input it’s been given.”

Hardwick said he’s used it only once in an effort to figure out how to visit all the Christmas markets he could before embarking on a trip to Europe. “It saved me a lot of time,” he said, adding he’s concerned that a preacher’s struggle “is part of the magic that God works in us as we preach.” Hardwick asked Gerber: “How do you think about ChatGPT and the struggle preachers need to go through?”

“One of the major features of AI is the quest for efficiency,” Gerber said. “That’s been part of the long tradition of teaching machines to do the work that we do. We’re looking to share the boring tasks we have, the tedious tasks that we have, to be more efficient.”

Gerber cited a study in which preachers claimed it took them 10-15 hours each week to write their sermon. “That’s pretty inefficient work,” she said. But “what if the struggle of writing a sermon, the inefficiency of writing a sermon by a human, is part of the essential nature of preaching?”

Preachers spend “hours and hours” completing their exegesis each week, Hardwick noted, “and maybe 10% is going to make its way into your sermon. The problem is, you don’t know which 10%. God uses that inefficiency not just to craft a sermon, but to craft us so the Word becomes embedded in our lives.”

Some people worry about plagiarism when using ChatGPT as a sermon aid, Gerber said. “Technically, it’s not taking chunks from famous sermons. It’s creating something new,” and thus is not plagiarism.

“But there is the issue of our honesty and integrity as preachers,” Gerber said. Preachers can get very busy during the week, and they might conclude that for this week when they’re feeling overwhelmed, they need a sermon produced by ChatGPT. “Do you just get up and preach that sermon without telling everybody that ChatGPT wrote it?” Gerber asked. “To me, that’s an issue of your honesty and integrity.”

“Why would anybody listen to that sermon? They’re thinking, you didn’t put in any time for me. Why should I put 20 minutes in for you?” Gerber said. But if the preacher goes to the senior pastor or the session and asks how they’d feel about such a choice during an especially difficult week, “I cannot imagine a session that wouldn’t say, ‘Absolutely!’”

Another ChatGPT caveat is that preachers who study their texts at length are “bursting at the seams with information and joy about this passage from Scripture. Some of that does come out after you preach,” Gerber said. The preacher might continue the conversation over the sermon during coffee hour and Bible study. “I don’t think the sermon really ends when the preacher steps down from the pulpit … When those echoes are going on, I want to bring God’s Word in those moments. I want it to live inside me,” a difficult ask when ChatGPT has crafted the sermon.

ChatGPT also doesn’t know the congregation in the same way the preacher does, and so it may not select biblical texts as well as the preacher can. In fact, ChatGPT sermons selected by AI would rely overwhelmingly on popular Scriptures including John 3:16 and Psalm 23, according to Gerber.

“I think of ChatGPT as an eager but sometimes mistaken intern in my office,” Gerber told Hardwick. “It’s a collaborator, but one I am thinking cautiously about the information given to me.” Geber will enter a paragraph into ChatGPT with a blank, then ask it to provide 10 options. “It always gives me the word I have been trying to think of,” she said. It’s the same with offering up options on sentences to join paragraphs together.

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“If ChatGPT can help me get from here to there, more power to it,” Hardwick said.

If a preacher wants a focus statement for her sermon, place the sermon in ChatGPT and ask for 20 variations that are, for example, more poetic or that use alliteration, Gerber advised. “It could lead you on a path that could lead to something better,” Gerber said.

Preachers interested in using ChatGPT as a collaborator ought to learn the basics of prompt engineering, Gerber said.

“Sometimes preachers will say that AI is useless for my congregation because it doesn’t know my congregation like I do,” Gerber said. But it can learn about the congregation and hold the knowledge of the congregation better than the preacher can, she said. If the preacher feeds in the characteristics of the people hearing the sermon — who’s going through divorce, for example, or who has recently buried a child who overdosed on drugs — ChatGPT can offer up tailored applications for each person. “When we’re writing a sermon,” Gerber said, “it’s hard for us to hold in our mind every person who’s going to listen to it.”

Gerber suggested preachers use ChatGPT “as a way to push your thinking out of yourself and onto different people. That was unexpected to me,” she told Hardwick. “I discovered it was helpful to see a different way I could engage with it.”

“Go experiment, but don’t let it write your whole sermon,” Gerber suggested. “Go play. Preachers need to play more.”